The 35 most LGBT-friendly U.S. Cities, according to Vocativ’s ‘Queer Index’

Which U.S. city is most friendly toward LGBT residents? Which big cities don’t even make the list? What’s the gayest city in “red state” America? Which metro area has the highest percentage of out politicians? Where do same-sex Craigslist hookups happen most frequently?

Vocativ, a global media organization for the “digital generation,” claims it has the answers in its first-ever data survey of the LGBT community nationwide — the Queer Index — which goes live today.

The Queer Index is a rich analysis of dozens of quality-of-life factors for America’s LGBT communities in 100 U.S. cities, based on Vocativ’s proprietary technology that mines the deep web—the 80 percent of the internet outside the scope of search engines.

The Index sources 32 publicly available data sets to analyze 16 key lifestyle metrics. It weighs variables that reflect and influence how and where LGBT Americans live, work, play, party, fall in love and raise families.

Specific factors explored include the size of cities’ LGBT communities, number of out singles, queer-friendly businesses, hate-crime rates and even the ease of casual hookups.

“For Pride Month, we wanted to create a useful, fun guide to LGBT life across the country,” said Scott Cohen, CEO of Vocativ.

“We started off with a simple premise: What’s life really like for the queer community. From there we homed in on the community’s passions, concerns and daily realities—and then we started collecting the data. Diving into the numbers, we learned new things about known LGBT meccas. For example, New York City has the most hate groups in the country. We also found countless surprises. Who knew that Memphis has the most single lesbians per capita in the country?”

“To get a snapshot of LGBT life across the country, the traditional approach would be to collect the opinions of a few so-called experts. But big data and the deep web allow Vocativ to go infinitely broader, into a world free of spin and full of hidden truths, where stories reveal themselves.

“The Queer Index shows just how fast LGBT rights and public opinion about that community are changing—and not just in big metro areas, but also increasingly in smaller cities throughout the country.”

Vocativ’s web technology and analysts surveyed information from across the deep web, open databases, public sites and social networks, including Craigslist, Facebook, Yelp, Rentboy, the U.S. census and the FBI crimes database, among others.

A few interesting highlights unearthed by the Index include:

The Washington, D.C., metro area has the highest percentage of out adults. At the same time, the nation’s capital has the highest number of anti-LGBT hate groups.